By pledging your support today, you can see your name printed in the book alongside the great names of stage and screen. In her own life, Kate has cared for her father and mother, and for her 90-year-old mother-in-law, Granny Rosie. Authie believes he has his hands on the Codex, but hands it over to his superiors who also want to use it to gain power despite his obsessive desire to destroy. When nineteen-year-old Minou Joubert receives an anonymous letter reading only SHE KNOWS THAT YOU LIVE, she realises she must decipher this mysterious message. There were too many characters without fully fleshed out personalities or descriptions, so it seemed a bit tedious.

With her Languedoc trilogy Kate Mosse has firmly established herself as the go-to girl for blockbuster time-slip romantic adventure . Cruise one of the oldest canals in the world; the Canal du Midi is unique and breathtakingly beautiful, earning the title of UNESCO World Heritage Site. Kate Mosse is an international bestselling author with sales of more than five million copies in 42 languages. I made myself finish it as a matter of principle, but really gained absolutely nothing from it except a slow sense of crippling ennui and a desire to stick pins in my own eyes on a regular basis (which I couldn't help but repeatedly roll after each ridiculous cliche that I read).Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Observer Kate Mosse OBE, her reputation as a champion of popular fiction cemented. The novel is steeped in the landscape and history of the Languedoc – Kate Mosse has lived in Carcassonne, a major staging post on the Canal du Midi, for thirty years and draws much of her inspiration from the region.

Then when it is finally used, it saves a small number of villagers and has no real impact on the war itself.Since we’re talking gastronomy, should you be visiting Carcassonne on a Friday, don’t miss the fabulous food market in Place Carnot, only five minutes stroll from the canal. Her network - codenamed 'Citadel' - is made up of ordinary women who risk everything to fight the sinister battles raging in the shadows around them. It’s one thing to take a lovely great fat book away with you on vacation, but quite another to cruise into the city which inspired it on a luxury barge, tie it up for the night and set off on the lookout for literary associations. As always with her books, it has strengthened my wish to visit the area and soak up some of the history for myself. When it’s actually happening, it is a different thing entirely, more pernicious and less overtly easy to throw off.

The Ahnenerbe are also pursuing this codex, apparently with Authié's assistance, though to their cost they fail to realise that his motivation for securing it is quite different to theirs. Her books include the multimillion-selling Languedoc trilogy which begins with the unmissable Labyrinth, and the bestselling more recent series, The Joubert Family Chronicles. Rather, they see the pound sign and are willing to flog any old pile of crap even if the author does not truly have a novel in them. Don't let my comments put you off starting the series, I recommend the first two books to all, you just might not have the stamina to finish the third.

From the internationally bestselling author of Labyrinth and Sepulchre comes a thrilling novel, set in the South of France during World War II, that interweaves history and legend, love and conflict, passion and adventure, bringing to life brave women of the French Resistance and a secret they must protect from the Nazis. Even though it is very heavy and hard to hold while reading in bed, ‘Citadel’ was a swift and pleasurable read. When Dr Alice Tanner discovers two skeletons during an archaeological dig in southern France, she unearths a link with an extraordinary past.

I enjoyed reading about Carcassonne and greatly enjoyed the history involved in the creation of the novel. Arininus is desperately trying to find a hiding place for the forbidden 'Codex', which is said to have the power to raise a 'sleeping army of ghosts'. It has been more than a decade since the Great War ended but Freddie is still mourning the loss of his brother. Mosse plunges into the dark and bloody years of Vichy France, subjecting her largely female cast to terrible pain and anguish. He spends long tracts of time in a sanatorium recovering, but in 1928 departs on a journey through the French Pyrenees.I needn't have worried as I enjoyed it even more as an audiobook, especially as Finty Williams was a perfect narrator, really bringing this book and it's characters to life. So as 'Citadel' was billed as the third in the series, I thought that having just read a series of fairly weighty literary poetry collections, I would delve into the third Mosse offering. As in the first two books, Mosse sets up two narrative threads progressing in parallel, though the difference here is that neither concerns the present day.